Change to Propane (110 octane) or LNG (octane 130). Though probably have to retrofit underwing or tip tanks (already some types on market). Both are much cheaper fuels, and engines could be made higher performance with higher compression ratios.
Diesels get peak efficiencies of 40-45% at car sized, 45-48% at truck sized, 53% for biggest ships. Bump that up a little when operating in cold air at altitude. Small helicopter turboshafts and turboprops for light aircraft are typically 25% efficient. Even the biggest 777 turbofans are only about 40% efficient at sea level. though that rises to mid to high 40's at cruise altitude where it is -60C
They have been doing demos at small scale, but to really pay out big it needs to be done at much larger scale - as the line drag becomes a smaller and smaller loss the bigger you go and the wind stronger the higher they get. Given that most of their challenges are control system related solving them in small scale means the scale up should be far less risky (flying kites is really really hard compared to aircraft etc due to dominating and unknowable future variance of wind speed and direction)
And if you look at it from a simple cost of materials point of view the systems will be far less than 10% the weight of the turbines they replace, while the wind power flux they can access is several times as high at the altitudes they are aiming at. They are predicting less than half the cost of existing wind energy, but might end up even lower.
Fundamentally there is nothing preventing 10's or even eventually 100's of MW per wing, and its a lot easier to stick out at sea or in other tricky geographical locations than trying to assemble the current huge turbines and their towers.
Get a duty free bottle of champagne, make a 100W heater element with some silicone sealant or an o-ring that you can insert into the top and lock in under high pressure.
Open bottle in toilet, insert heater, put in bag surrounded by insulating clothes inside a plastic bag to prevent release of burning smells. Hook into the onboard laptop power supply in your business class seat, wait about 8-10 hours. Eventually steam pressure and temperature overwhelms bottle strength. Boom - equivalent of about 3-400g high explosive.
All airport security is obviously bullshit. Men can easily fit 1kg of high explosive up their arses if they are willing to practice, and women have more than one option for hiding such items beyond the view of all scanning.
Even if it was igniting and had good fusion gain, there are such a huge array of serious engineering issues that they have got no economic answers for that it is never going to work commercially. High precision optics in close proximity to nuclear blasts?? High precision targets that cost $10k (but would have to reduce to $0.25 to be commercial) being introduced into a plasma filled chamber at 15Hz that must be positioned with sub mm precision? May as well keep it running now for the materials side of things, but as much as possible fusion R&D budgets should be directed away from NIF and ITER (tokomaks are too big and too expensive to be commercially viable) and towards fusion options with at least some potential for commercial viability like: General fusion (liquid metal implosion on plasma target), Tri-Alpha, Helion (electromagnetic compression of plasma toroids), Polywell (Inertial electrostatic confinement in a magnetised 'wiffleball' trap).
Also Fission in fast breeders provides a far more certain short term payoff, cheap, managable engineering issues, no nasty tritium to deal with and massively reducing radioactive waste compared to current non-breeding reactors. There is enough accessible Thorium and Uranium to power our civilisation at current levels until the sun kills the earth.
There must be a pretty good chance that USSR and perhaps also China have smuggled nukes into the USA and buried them near important strategic targets like the Pentagon, The Mall, and possibly even some major cities. To give an ultimate and anonymous 1st strike capability. Given how porous US borders are a competent govt backed group could pull this off with very low risk.
Excellent, so at 1% for usps insurance, and with a product that has enormous markup on it (probably >80% for hipster shoes), this business will be profiting with 5% higher sales. Not to mention increasing their profile with their target market due to the religious persecution of the USPS.
So why does it appear that water vapour in the atmosphere (upper atmos) has been falling for the last 30 years even as global temperatures and CO2 have been increasing? Faults in the Data or in the Theory? http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm
The only reason that North Korea currently exists is to maintain a few 1000 top officials in relative wealth - but even that wealth is pretty poor compared to the West. If South Korea were to offer the top 10,000 officials in the north $1-100 million each (depending on position) + immunity from prosecution then they could probably reunify Korea within a year, and save themselves a lot of money in the long term.
A number of reviewers have noted that the methodology is somewhat flawed in that the temporal resolution of the proxies used to reconstruct ancient temperatures is very low - up to 500 years, whereas the modern global temperature data that is appended to produce the hockeystick graph is at high resolution. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23247-true-face-of-climates-hockey-stick-graph-revealed.html
This, along with the averaging effect of combining numerous noisy proxy data streams has the effect of removing significant features such as the medieval, roman, minoan warming periods where temperatures rose by as much as 2C for periods of 1-300 years. It also removes similar long duration temperature dips.
So ultimately the picture presented of historical temperatures is not realistic, if we were to apply the same temporal low pass filtering to the modern temperature record as well you would not even see the recent temperature rise, and the little ice age would probably disappear as well. Eg look as Gisp2 ice core temp data for a reasonably good picture of historic temperatures: http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/6063/gisp2.jpg shows same general trend as this paper, just preserves the frequent 1-500 year temp oscillations
There are quite a few other relatively cheap options below 77K. In particular using vacuum to lower the temperature of liquid Nitrogen is pretty easy and gets you to 64K with the nitrogen still a liquid. Same trick with liquid Oxygen (also dirt cheap) gets you to 55K and liquid Neon is about 25K (and when we run out of easily mineable Helium it will be cheaper than helium). Liquid Hydrogen can be used at down to 14K using evacuation (20K at atmospheric pressure).
if SSDs were made up of several smaller swappable/replaceable SSD chunks in a Raid 5 or 6 setup then that would basically put a stop to unreliable SSDs by giving a recoverable failure mode. It might also make it more practical to use denser and cheaper but shorter life flash memory in the SSDs.
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
They are planning a Mars fly-by so apart from the problem of providing life support for 500 days there is actually less deltaV required than for the Apollo moon missions because they don't need an extra 4.5km/s to land and takeoff from the moon's surface.
Almost all the fuel will be used at earth escape, and only minimal maneuvering thrust from there on so a modified dragon capsule is probably capable of doing the job. Launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket that might cost less than $200 million in total (costs $140 million for a Falcon 9 Dragon launch to LEO).
The dragon capsule can carry 6.6 tonnes of payload and is designed to survive in space for up to 2 years, so has more than enough capacity to support 2 people. And while some may claim that 2 people cannot survive in a capsule that big for a year and a half for psychological reasons, that is just bollocks - but it will be easier if they pick people with the right sort of temperament.
1/ They have the bomb. 2/ They are desperate for money, and have few qualms, and seemingly little good judgement about doing whatever it takes to get money to maintain their fucked up internal power structure. $2 billion per year exports at moment, but $3 billion imports and $20 billion external debt 3/ There are numerous groups in the world who do not like the west (some 'terrorists', some countries) who could probably raise a few hundred million to a billion dollars to buy a nuclear bomb. 4/ Short of hitting them with a pre-emptive nuclear strike North Korea cannot be invaded/stopped without massive risk/destruction to South Korea, Japan, and possibly USA (nuclear weapons + ICBM), also huge danger from China if it comes to a shooting war/invasion.
Pretty good chance that North Korea will sell a bomb to someone to use on a western city. Iran and pakistan are also moderately dangerous. I wouldn't feel particularly safe living in coastal USA cities, or Israel for that matter in the next 20 years.
If your business has to pay more than offshore competitors for the tools it uses then you have a major problem.
Strong case could be made that any company that sells it's software at lower cost in other countries should be legislatively compelled to match that within your country, but would need someone powerful (like EU or WTO) to make it happen.
Historically large differences in relative wealth (gini coefficients) are strongly correlelated with the breakdown of society and revolutions etc. The US is already pretty high in OECD terms, and has pretty appalling stats in access to health care incarceration rates, crime, educational outcomes for poor kids etc that tend to go along with having a high gini coefficient. You have a huge and growing pool of americans who have little to no real hope of being able to get their kids into even the middle class.
The Trust Fund Kids of the Walton family (Walmart) have a net worth equal to the poorest 90 million US Americans. (That absolutely staggers me). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family Now assume for a moment that they have little or no interest, aptitude, or industriousness in using that capital in an efficient manner to grow further enterprises (ie improve the country) but simply want to live as emperors - I don't know if that is actually true, but in some cases it may be. Such colossally rich individuals who have not created that wealth themselves but have simply chosen their parents carefully are in effect a useless nouveau aristocracy.
That equity would be far better in the hands of hard working people further down the chain who could use it to start businesses, improve infrastructure, develop technology, educate their kids etc, but given the size of their money pile and the relatively small birth rates of today, there is a strong possiblity that their dynasty could maintain or even with minimal effort grow their total holdings as a proportion of GDP over the coming decades/centuries.
I have no problem with entrepreneurs getting rich, but that wealth needs to be returned to the rest society within a couple of generations if you want to have a dynamic society based upon egality, fraternity and liberty (that is what the French revolution was all about) and not a world of gated communities and violent ghettos. How you go about constructing a society that achieves that is left as an exercise for the reader, but massive inheritance taxes (above some level) seem like a pretty useful component.
The criminal justice system in the USA appears to be almost entirely geared towards extracting more tax money to pay for bigger and more heavily populated prisons and building name recognition for politicians and prosecutors, and as a result is paying a colossal and unnecessary and is a world wide laughing stock. I and a lot of my friends would not consider living in the USA as a result of this Criminal-Justice system run amok, scary thuggish police, (dreadfully overpriced yet widely inaccessible health care system is also another black mark).
The Criminal-Justice system needs to be reformed towards delivering the best results for society as a whole, not venal special interest groups. Disqualify anyone within the Criminal Justice industry (prosecutors, police, guards) from running for public office for at least a few years after they end employment, also disallow campaign contributions from private prisons, and guard+police unions.
The biggest and fastest growing threat to humanity is disease and religion (including anti-human greens). Think 12 monkeys or "The White Plague" (frank herbert).
in 2011 a researcher invented a flu strain with human mortality of probably about 50%. A small number of motivated nut jobs, perhaps even a single person with a couple of million dollars could probably replicate this with far less visibility than for example nuclear weapons programs. There are a large number of highly educated people in the world who would like to wipe or cut down the human population by a large degree.
Even a worst case global nuclear war is unlikely to kill so many. There is nowhere on the planet more than 2 days travel away. Nowhere to hide, and no means of preventing such a thing coming to pass if released in a mobile 1st world population centre with millions of motivated individuals desperate to escape an epidemic.
Marianas trench is 11km deep. A neutrally bouyant gun barrel inclined at about 20 gives a barrel length of 30km and is relatively cheap to build (a couple of billion for a few meters diameter).
If you immerse the astronauts in water (body hugging 'bath') they can easily withstand 10-20g for 15-30 seconds. That gives you 2.5-3.5km/s muzzle velocity, and a relatively simple rocket to prvodie the additional 5-6km/s - similar to current rocket second stages.
The gun can also be used at higher g to launch inert payload to orbital speeds without less rocket propulsion.
Guns are ok for lower speeds (up to perhaps 2-3km/s) but ram - accelrators are better than light gas guns for higher speeds.
Leaked figure from IPCC AR5 report shows just how far off even updated IPCC model predictions are: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ipcc_ar5_draft_fig1-4_with.png note that the grey bands are nothing more than an attempt at IPCC arse covering in light of failed predictions, the temps are consistently riding the low side and even outside of the coloured prediction bands, and most importantly the temperature trend is much much lower than predicted.
The IPCC's models are massively over estimating the impact of increased CO2 - unsurprising when they assume large positive water vapour feedback that don't appear to operate as they assume in practice, and temperature suppressing aerosol impacts that appear to have been overestimated too. They also don't have the capacity to model other dominating effects (like PDO and AMO oceanic cycles, solar variations etc), and have shown no ability to model or explain historical variation covering a 3 C band during the current interglacial - including eras like the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm period and the little ice age.
An honest question: how many years of no temperature rise would it take for the catastrophic CAGW thesis to be rejected? We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise. So just how many more years are needed for the IPCC to let go of the millenialist thermageddon fantasy and bring the temperature rise predictions back to a more realistic level (seems likely to be about 1-2C rise for a CO2 doubling).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants Current cost in China $2000kW (using latest AP1000 design), targeting $1000/kW in near future. Which is why China is going to dominate the global nuclear industry. The cost reductions enabled by building large numbers of plants of the same/similar design are huge.
Slashdot Mirror
not the first to think of that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6p3xlCnSjc
Change to Propane (110 octane) or LNG (octane 130). Though probably have to retrofit underwing or tip tanks (already some types on market). Both are much cheaper fuels, and engines could be made higher performance with higher compression ratios.
Turboprops are not more efficient.
Diesels get peak efficiencies of 40-45% at car sized, 45-48% at truck sized, 53% for biggest ships. Bump that up a little when operating in cold air at altitude. Small helicopter turboshafts and turboprops for light aircraft are typically 25% efficient. Even the biggest 777 turbofans are only about 40% efficient at sea level. though that rises to mid to high 40's at cruise altitude where it is -60C
They have been doing demos at small scale, but to really pay out big it needs to be done at much larger scale - as the line drag becomes a smaller and smaller loss the bigger you go and the wind stronger the higher they get. Given that most of their challenges are control system related solving them in small scale means the scale up should be far less risky (flying kites is really really hard compared to aircraft etc due to dominating and unknowable future variance of wind speed and direction)
And if you look at it from a simple cost of materials point of view the systems will be far less than 10% the weight of the turbines they replace, while the wind power flux they can access is several times as high at the altitudes they are aiming at. They are predicting less than half the cost of existing wind energy, but might end up even lower.
Fundamentally there is nothing preventing 10's or even eventually 100's of MW per wing, and its a lot easier to stick out at sea or in other tricky geographical locations than trying to assemble the current huge turbines and their towers.
A very unflattering analysis of Rossi's latest:
http://shutdownrossi.com/
Get a duty free bottle of champagne, make a 100W heater element with some silicone sealant or an o-ring that you can insert into the top and lock in under high pressure.
Open bottle in toilet, insert heater, put in bag surrounded by insulating clothes inside a plastic bag to prevent release of burning smells. Hook into the onboard laptop power supply in your business class seat, wait about 8-10 hours.
Eventually steam pressure and temperature overwhelms bottle strength. Boom - equivalent of about 3-400g high explosive.
All airport security is obviously bullshit. Men can easily fit 1kg of high explosive up their arses if they are willing to practice, and women have more than one option for hiding such items beyond the view of all scanning.
Even if it was igniting and had good fusion gain, there are such a huge array of serious engineering issues that they have got no economic answers for that it is never going to work commercially. High precision optics in close proximity to nuclear blasts?? High precision targets that cost $10k (but would have to reduce to $0.25 to be commercial) being introduced into a plasma filled chamber at 15Hz that must be positioned with sub mm precision? May as well keep it running now for the materials side of things, but as much as possible fusion R&D budgets should be directed away from NIF and ITER (tokomaks are too big and too expensive to be commercially viable) and towards fusion options with at least some potential for commercial viability like:
General fusion (liquid metal implosion on plasma target), Tri-Alpha, Helion (electromagnetic compression of plasma toroids), Polywell (Inertial electrostatic confinement in a magnetised 'wiffleball' trap).
Also Fission in fast breeders provides a far more certain short term payoff, cheap, managable engineering issues, no nasty tritium to deal with and massively reducing radioactive waste compared to current non-breeding reactors. There is enough accessible Thorium and Uranium to power our civilisation at current levels until the sun kills the earth.
There must be a pretty good chance that USSR and perhaps also China have smuggled nukes into the USA and buried them near important strategic targets like the Pentagon, The Mall, and possibly even some major cities. To give an ultimate and anonymous 1st strike capability. Given how porous US borders are a competent govt backed group could pull this off with very low risk.
Excellent, so at 1% for usps insurance, and with a product that has enormous markup on it (probably >80% for hipster shoes), this business will be profiting with 5% higher sales. Not to mention increasing their profile with their target market due to the religious persecution of the USPS.
God works in mysterious ways.
So why does it appear that water vapour in the atmosphere (upper atmos) has been falling for the last 30 years even as global temperatures and CO2 have been increasing? Faults in the Data or in the Theory?
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm
The only reason that North Korea currently exists is to maintain a few 1000 top officials in relative wealth - but even that wealth is pretty poor compared to the West. If South Korea were to offer the top 10,000 officials in the north $1-100 million each (depending on position) + immunity from prosecution then they could probably reunify Korea within a year, and save themselves a lot of money in the long term.
A number of reviewers have noted that the methodology is somewhat flawed in that the temporal resolution of the proxies used to reconstruct ancient temperatures is very low - up to 500 years, whereas the modern global temperature data that is appended to produce the hockeystick graph is at high resolution.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23247-true-face-of-climates-hockey-stick-graph-revealed.html
This, along with the averaging effect of combining numerous noisy proxy data streams has the effect of removing significant features such as the medieval, roman, minoan warming periods where temperatures rose by as much as 2C for periods of 1-300 years. It also removes similar long duration temperature dips.
So ultimately the picture presented of historical temperatures is not realistic, if we were to apply the same temporal low pass filtering to the modern temperature record as well you would not even see the recent temperature rise, and the little ice age would probably disappear as well. Eg look as Gisp2 ice core temp data for a reasonably good picture of historic temperatures:
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/6063/gisp2.jpg
shows same general trend as this paper, just preserves the frequent 1-500 year temp oscillations
There are quite a few other relatively cheap options below 77K. In particular using vacuum to lower the temperature of liquid Nitrogen is pretty easy and gets you to 64K with the nitrogen still a liquid. Same trick with liquid Oxygen (also dirt cheap) gets you to 55K and liquid Neon is about 25K (and when we run out of easily mineable Helium it will be cheaper than helium). Liquid Hydrogen can be used at down to 14K using evacuation (20K at atmospheric pressure).
if SSDs were made up of several smaller swappable/replaceable SSD chunks in a Raid 5 or 6 setup then that would basically put a stop to unreliable SSDs by giving a recoverable failure mode. It might also make it more practical to use denser and cheaper but shorter life flash memory in the SSDs.
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
They are planning a Mars fly-by so apart from the problem of providing life support for 500 days there is actually less deltaV required than for the Apollo moon missions because they don't need an extra 4.5km/s to land and takeoff from the moon's surface.
Almost all the fuel will be used at earth escape, and only minimal maneuvering thrust from there on so a modified dragon capsule is probably capable of doing the job. Launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket that might cost less than $200 million in total (costs $140 million for a Falcon 9 Dragon launch to LEO).
The dragon capsule can carry 6.6 tonnes of payload and is designed to survive in space for up to 2 years, so has more than enough capacity to support 2 people. And while some may claim that 2 people cannot survive in a capsule that big for a year and a half for psychological reasons, that is just bollocks - but it will be easier if they pick people with the right sort of temperament.
1/ They have the bomb.
2/ They are desperate for money, and have few qualms, and seemingly little good judgement about doing whatever it takes to get money to maintain their fucked up internal power structure. $2 billion per year exports at moment, but $3 billion imports and $20 billion external debt
3/ There are numerous groups in the world who do not like the west (some 'terrorists', some countries) who could probably raise a few hundred million to a billion dollars to buy a nuclear bomb.
4/ Short of hitting them with a pre-emptive nuclear strike North Korea cannot be invaded/stopped without massive risk/destruction to South Korea, Japan, and possibly USA (nuclear weapons + ICBM), also huge danger from China if it comes to a shooting war/invasion.
Pretty good chance that North Korea will sell a bomb to someone to use on a western city. Iran and pakistan are also moderately dangerous. I wouldn't feel particularly safe living in coastal USA cities, or Israel for that matter in the next 20 years.
If your business has to pay more than offshore competitors for the tools it uses then you have a major problem.
Strong case could be made that any company that sells it's software at lower cost in other countries should be legislatively compelled to match that within your country, but would need someone powerful (like EU or WTO) to make it happen.
Historically large differences in relative wealth (gini coefficients) are strongly correlelated with the breakdown of society and revolutions etc. The US is already pretty high in OECD terms, and has pretty appalling stats in access to health care incarceration rates, crime, educational outcomes for poor kids etc that tend to go along with having a high gini coefficient. You have a huge and growing pool of americans who have little to no real hope of being able to get their kids into even the middle class.
The Trust Fund Kids of the Walton family (Walmart) have a net worth equal to the poorest 90 million US Americans. (That absolutely staggers me).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family
Now assume for a moment that they have little or no interest, aptitude, or industriousness in using that capital in an efficient manner to grow further enterprises (ie improve the country) but simply want to live as emperors - I don't know if that is actually true, but in some cases it may be. Such colossally rich individuals who have not created that wealth themselves but have simply chosen their parents carefully are in effect a useless nouveau aristocracy.
That equity would be far better in the hands of hard working people further down the chain who could use it to start businesses, improve infrastructure, develop technology, educate their kids etc, but given the size of their money pile and the relatively small birth rates of today, there is a strong possiblity that their dynasty could maintain or even with minimal effort grow their total holdings as a proportion of GDP over the coming decades/centuries.
I have no problem with entrepreneurs getting rich, but that wealth needs to be returned to the rest society within a couple of generations if you want to have a dynamic society based upon egality, fraternity and liberty (that is what the French revolution was all about) and not a world of gated communities and violent ghettos. How you go about constructing a society that achieves that is left as an exercise for the reader, but massive inheritance taxes (above some level) seem like a pretty useful component.
... run away from our new hedge pruning, tree trimming, log cutting, Edward Chainsaw-hands overlords.
The criminal justice system in the USA appears to be almost entirely geared towards extracting more tax money to pay for bigger and more heavily populated prisons and building name recognition for politicians and prosecutors, and as a result is paying a colossal and unnecessary and is a world wide laughing stock. I and a lot of my friends would not consider living in the USA as a result of this Criminal-Justice system run amok, scary thuggish police, (dreadfully overpriced yet widely inaccessible health care system is also another black mark).
The Criminal-Justice system needs to be reformed towards delivering the best results for society as a whole, not venal special interest groups. Disqualify anyone within the Criminal Justice industry (prosecutors, police, guards) from running for public office for at least a few years after they end employment, also disallow campaign contributions from private prisons, and guard+police unions.
The biggest and fastest growing threat to humanity is disease and religion (including anti-human greens). Think 12 monkeys or "The White Plague" (frank herbert).
in 2011 a researcher invented a flu strain with human mortality of probably about 50%. A small number of motivated nut jobs, perhaps even a single person with a couple of million dollars could probably replicate this with far less visibility than for example nuclear weapons programs. There are a large number of highly educated people in the world who would like to wipe or cut down the human population by a large degree.
Even a worst case global nuclear war is unlikely to kill so many. There is nowhere on the planet more than 2 days travel away. Nowhere to hide, and no means of preventing such a thing coming to pass if released in a mobile 1st world population centre with millions of motivated individuals desperate to escape an epidemic.
Marianas trench is 11km deep. A neutrally bouyant gun barrel inclined at about 20 gives a barrel length of 30km and is relatively cheap to build (a couple of billion for a few meters diameter).
If you immerse the astronauts in water (body hugging 'bath') they can easily withstand 10-20g for 15-30 seconds. That gives you 2.5-3.5km/s muzzle velocity, and a relatively simple rocket to prvodie the additional 5-6km/s - similar to current rocket second stages.
The gun can also be used at higher g to launch inert payload to orbital speeds without less rocket propulsion.
Guns are ok for lower speeds (up to perhaps 2-3km/s) but ram - accelrators are better than light gas guns for higher speeds.
Leaked figure from IPCC AR5 report shows just how far off even updated IPCC model predictions are:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ipcc_ar5_draft_fig1-4_with.png
note that the grey bands are nothing more than an attempt at IPCC arse covering in light of failed predictions, the temps are consistently riding the low side and even outside of the coloured prediction bands, and most importantly the temperature trend is much much lower than predicted.
The IPCC's models are massively over estimating the impact of increased CO2 - unsurprising when they assume large positive water vapour feedback that don't appear to operate as they assume in practice, and temperature suppressing aerosol impacts that appear to have been overestimated too. They also don't have the capacity to model other dominating effects (like PDO and AMO oceanic cycles, solar variations etc), and have shown no ability to model or explain historical variation covering a 3 C band during the current interglacial - including eras like the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm period and the little ice age.
An honest question: how many years of no temperature rise would it take for the catastrophic CAGW thesis to be rejected? We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise. So just how many more years are needed for the IPCC to let go of the millenialist thermageddon fantasy and bring the temperature rise predictions back to a more realistic level (seems likely to be about 1-2C rise for a CO2 doubling).
So Current costs in France: $6500/kW installed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
Current cost in China $2000kW (using latest AP1000 design), targeting $1000/kW in near future. Which is why China is going to dominate the global nuclear industry. The cost reductions enabled by building large numbers of plants of the same/similar design are huge.